


Glitch and Loner's Wacky Adventures; or, a strange but effective way of finding a family

by storm_warning



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: First Meetings, Force Visions, Force-Sensitive Clone Troopers (Star Wars), Gen, Not Beta Read, Psychometry, anyway! behold! glitch's name is canon, because one of the characters is obscure enough that you had to make up a name for them, loner's is not, minor technological hand-waving, you know youre doing it right when you have to make a brand new character tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-17 21:41:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29599158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storm_warning/pseuds/storm_warning
Summary: Glitch, assumed dead by the GAR and left stranded on Draay 2, finds a broken-down droid and has a strange vision.Loner is just glad to wake up somewhere that's not a battlefield.
Relationships: Glitch & Loner
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	Glitch and Loner's Wacky Adventures; or, a strange but effective way of finding a family

**Author's Note:**

> hey! it's my incredibly niche fic! i do plan to write more of this in the future once i'm done with another longer clone wars fic (wink), so keep an eye out!
> 
> Both of these dudes are canon, though as stated in the tags i did make up Loner's name. Glitch is from a comic called The Clone Wars: Defenders Of The Lost Temple; Loner is from Clone Wars Adventures Volume 8.
> 
> Special shoutout to the clone wars channel of hdtf hell (you know who you are) for fueling my brainrot to untold levels. you guys are fucking insane and i love u

It doesn’t start out as much of anything at all, but, Glitch supposes, the Force often works in mysterious ways. 

He’s out of the temple on an expedition, scavenging for spare parts and peices on on the fringes of a long-abandoned battlefield. He kicks aside a crushed, empty battery canister, and stops short.

He looks to his left, towards the sparse line of trees that proceed a deep, lush forest. He doesn’t see anything with his eyes, no, but something is  _ calling _ him there. It washes through him like a breeze, the same kind of familiar instinct that would lead him to touch a glowing pillar, to collapse a temple.

The  _ Force _ , he knows now. As always, he follows. 

His feet lead him through the woods, down a steep hill by a cliff, past the broken remains of a super-battle droid. The call beckons him yet further on, but he pauses to look at the wrecked droid for a moment, body half-overgrown by moss and vegetation. He feels an odd kind of deep, aching sadness at the sight, but after a while forces himself to tear his eyes away and continue forwards.

Light warms his face as he arrives in a clearing, and he finally comes to a halt on top of a picturesque, sun-dappled little hill. 

He blinks, and finally focuses on what’s in front of him. It’s a shut-down battle droid, sitting peacefully under the tree, tawny metal covered in scratches and wear-marks. A long, jagged scar stretches along its face, and the left part of its head is clear of metal casing, exposing a tangle of red wires and a dead, yellow interior eyepiece.

Glitch hums, and a smile begins to creep across his face. His fingers tap excitedly at the plate of his thigh armor. An entire intact droid! If he can get this back to his base, he can try to recharge it, and assuming it doesn’t immediately try to kill him, he might have someone to  _ talk _ to!

“The Force flows,” he says out loud to himself, and also the droid, he guesses, even though it can’t hear him, and puts a hand on the--

\--the--

\--the water of a rushing stream is surrounding him, surrounding the jutting rock he’s just been thrown into. He puts a hand up to his eye, ignoring the sparks swimming in his vision. For the very first time in his life, everything is deafeningly, terrifyingly, freeingly  _ quiet _ . He has no lungs to gasp in breath, no pulse to race, but--

\--but--

\--but, he stands on a cliff-edge, and he cannot quite feel the breeze because his movement sensors are not built for it but he sees the sun and the trees and small flying creatures dip which through the air gracefully and he knows he can’t go back, he will not continue the fight--

\--the fight--

\--the fight is over. He gets up, and frees himself from the twisted form of his pursuer, watches as they helplessly shudder and spark on the ground, listen as they speak last words-- dying words, holds their claw gently as he can as they slip into the nothingness that is permanent shutdown. Walk away. Walk for a while, to a tree on a hill, where he sits down and--

\--and--

\--and his eyes open. He’s slumped over the droid, and his head is pounding something  _ awful _ , fuzzy spots dancing in front of his eyes. He groans, and blinks until they clear a little. Another vision, he pieces together belatedly. 

Glitch doesn’t mind having visions-- they’re exciting, usually-- but he  _ really _ wishes they didn’t make him pass out like that. He pushes himself upright again, listing slightly at the spike of nausea and pain that shoots through him. He doesn’t seem to be otherwise injured, though, so he takes a few moments to sit still and reorient himself until his brain stops spinning and the sharp flashes of pain turn into a dull ache. This has happened before, and he knows he’ll be fine after a while.

He looks at where his arms are still draped across the battle droid, and jolts back. His visions usually only affect him the first time he touches something, but…

He hesitantly reaches a hand back out, flinching slightly when it makes contact. Nothing. 

Sighing in relief, he puts one hand around the droid’s back and the other under its knees in preparation to carry it back home with him.

He looks at its head where it drapes limply against his shoulder. A single, lone droid, all the way out here. His chest aches for it-- for  _ them _ , he thinks, and what he knows they’ve been through. 

He makes it to the bottom of the hill before he collapses. Oh,  _ kriff _ , why are they so  _ heavy _ ? His head is beginning to spin again, and he puts it between his knees. 

Glitch takes a calming breath. It was said that the Jedi were capable of great feats of strength, by letting the force flow through their bodies.  _ The force flows through me.  _ He can do this.

He gets up and shoulders the lone droid again, and keeps moving.

He only falters two more times, once on a very steep, rocky incline and once on the winding stairs leading to the portion of the temple where he’s been living. 

Once he makes it inside, he sets the droid down gently in a corner and collapses next to them, exhausted. 

His little corner of the temple is somewhere between organized chaos and outright cozy (if he does say so himself), various collections of salvaged parts and baubles stacked in meticulously organized fashion inside of cubbies fashioned out of cracks. One of the regulation tents he’d found miraculously mostly-intact in the rubble is sitting in a corner, stacked high with bedding and even a few clumsily handmade pillows. Scrapped projects and campfire ashes are dotted throughout the room, completing the picture of a very enthusiastically lived-in space.

Hauling himself up from the floor, grabbing a few things from the cubbies before moving to sit down at the chair in front of his work-table, both of which consist of some roughly appropriately-sized slabs of temple stone that he’d managed to move into place, half by his own strength and half by the help of the Force.

He smiles at the reminder. He’s not very good at moving things with the Force yet, but he knows that he  _ can _ , now, and he knows he can learn more, and that’s more than enough for him. He distinctly recalls outright sobbing the first time he had actually made something float-- the lightsaber, in fact, which now sits still-broken on his table. He hasn’t found a way to fix it yet, but he knows that he will. 

After a while spent fiddling with various parts, he manages to wrangle one of the spare droid-batteries he’s picked up out of sheer curiosity into charging. He taps his knuckles in a rhythm against the desk while he waits for it to charge fully. 

When the battery is done, he brings it back to the lone droid, and gently maneuvers them until he can take the dead one out of their battery-port and stick the new one in. 

The droid is unarmed, and still damaged, but he takes a few cautionary steps back as they begin to start up just to be safe. 

They don’t try to attack him, though, they don’t do that at all-- instead, they bring a hand up to the damaged part of their head, just like he had felt them do in his vision, and then they look up at him. 

“Who are you?” They ask, and Glitch feels a sudden surge of unadulterated, fluttering  _ hope _ wash through all of himself. He has to blink a few times to keep his eyes from welling up.

“My name is Glitch,” he says, watching them slowly pick themself up from the ground. “The Force led me to you, and I brought you back here to where I live, and gave you a new battery. Do you have a name?” 

“No, I don’t,” they reply, sounding despondent. “Until recently, I was part of a much larger collective. I don’t even remember my identification number.”

They pause for a moment. “But wait, you’re a clone, aren’t you? I didn’t know clones had names.”

Glitch bristles a little at that, despite himself. “Of course we do. My squadmates gave me my name,” and then, “What  _ do _ you know about clones?”

The droid tilts their head a little at that. “We’re not taught much about anything. The central command gives us orders, and we follow them. Then we die, then we’re salvaged and we die again.”

“Oh,” Glitch says, “Well-- you’re here with me now, and you don’t have to fight anymore. Not ever again.”

He feels a wave of that same crushing, impossible hope again, and realises with a quiet gasp that it doesn’t belong to him at all, but rather the droid.

He must be connecting to them through the Force, then. He didn’t know that battle droids even  _ felt _ emotions like that. The mangled bodies of the ones he’s shot down flash before his eyes, unbidden.

They’re both learning a lot of new things today, Glitch thinks. 

“Is this yours?” The droid asks, snapping him out of his thoughts. They’re looking curiously at Horns’ cracked helmet, which Glitch keeps in a special cubby all its own, so that he can return it when he finds Horns again.

He steps forward and gently picks the helmet up, running a thumb under the shattered eyepiece.

“This belongs to my brother. He left it here, because he--” his voice cracks, and he clears his throat, “because he thought I died. But I didn’t, so I’ll give it back to him when I see him again.”

“Brother?” 

“Yeah,” Glitch responds, “I have a lot of brothers. I miss them, but I…” his voice quiets, “I-- I don’t know. They might be glad that I’m not around anymore.”

“No, I mean--” the droid tilts their head to the side, as if struggling to pick out words. “What  _ is _ a brother?”

“Oh,” Glitch says. Something about them not knowing that saddens him.

“A brother is… a brother is someone who you grow up with, someone who you know you can trust. All the clones are my brothers.”

“Huh,” the droid says, “That sounds nice.”

Glitch, stupidly, feels a lump grow in his throat. “It is.”

He blinks hard to keep from tearing up. His brothers wouldn’t want him to cry, if they were here.

The droid doesn’t seem to notice, thankfully, and after a moment they walk back over to where they had woken up and sit down against the wall again. 

At a loss, Glitch sets the helmet back in place and sits down across from them.

The droid looks at him for a long moment, long enough that Glitch flicks his eyes away uncomfortably. 

“So you live here alone?” 

Glitch looks up at the question. “Yeah,” he says quietly, and then abruptly perks up, “we’re in an old Jedi temple right now! I’m protecting it.” Pride blooms in his chest at the statement. The protector of a  _ Jedi temple _ ! And he has his own lightsaber! Well, not  _ his _ , technically, but. His for now!

The droid starts forward, and Glitch feels a sudden spike of fear from them. “ _ Jedi _ ? You didn’t mention Jedi! There aren’t any still here, are there?”

“Oh! Oh, no. I’m the only one here. Well, except a few centipedes, probably. But they’re not immune to blaster fire anymore, so they’re fine.”

The fear bleeds into hesitant relief. “So you don’t… you’re not--” the droid breaks off, gesturing. “You don’t report to them anymore?” 

Glitch tilts his head to the side, considering. “Not…really, no?”

He’s still loyal to the Republic, of course he is, but it  _ is _ true that he doesn’t exactly report directly back to any Jedi anymore, which he thinks is what the droid is asking?

“Oh,” the droid responds, “that’s good. I don’t,” they put a hand up to the damaged side of their head again, like a nervous tic, “I don’t like Jedi. We’re programmed to view them as enemies, you know. Well, we-- I  _ was _ , back when I was connected to the mainframe. But I’m alone now.”

“Do you miss the other droids?” Glitch asks before he can think about it, and a familiar pang runs through his chest.

“I don’t… I don’t know. The mainframe was loud. I didn’t think about anything back then, just whichever new orders I was given. I--” the droid fidgets in place, and Glitch is struck again by the observation that the droid  _ does _ fidget, seems as alive as any other sentient he’s ever met, and he wonders if all the droids could be like this, if their Seperatist overseers didn’t deny them even that tiny sliver of free will. “I’m just alone now. A loner; that’s all there is to me.”

They don’t say  _ and that’s all there ever will be _ , but it hangs in the silence between them all the same.

“Well,” Glitch starts, chasing an inexplicably strong desire to make them feel better about it, “it makes you unique, doesn’t it? Nobody else is the same as you; you're the only loner we’ve got!”

He snaps his fingers, struck with a sudden thought. “Wait,  _ Loner _ ! What if that was your name?”

“Loner?” The droid repeats, and then more decisively, “Loner,” and then they repeat the word a few more times, as if testing it out. A warm, fuzzy feeling drifts through the force, and Glitch grins, sharing in the-- in  _ Loner’s _ excitement. 

“I like that,” they concede, and Glitch pats the floor happily for a moment before springing to his feet.

“It’s getting dark, so I’m going to start a fire,” he explains, and as he steps outside to gather a few logs from his makeshift woodpile, he looks up at the sky, a smattering of stars just beginning to peek out from the dusk, and  _ swears _ , just for a moment, that he can feel the Force wink back at him.

He smiles. For the first time in a long time, things are looking up.


End file.
